Celebrant (23 page)

deKlend approaches uncertainly, but preventing any uncollectedness from showing.

Looking at it, beginning to see in its surface the small dim peach-colored smudge that is the bent reflection of his own face, deKlend
knows
that a long-dead person is curled up inside the globe.

The figure’s arms limp at its sides, it stands not slouching, not straight, not swaying, not quite still.
The hands are plainly mechanical.
There are polished black shoes on the feet, the trousers are creased, milk-white cuffs emerge from the sleeves of a black, cheesecloth-looking kameez thrown awkwardly over the underlying clothes.
A pointed hood, far too small to cover that globe head, dangles down the back.
There is white shirt and black tie, a jacket
under the kameez.
Cold seeps invisibly from its clothes.

A messenger, like me (deKlend thinks)

There is certainly a quiet lapping sound, like breakers, coming from the being.

Making his salute, deKlend approaches meekly.

Sir, (he says, and falters)

Suddenly the figure is enshrouded in transparent vortices, noiselessly whirling.

deKlend rallies, and the pitchers grow swiftly less conspicuous.
He ventures his icebreaker.

I wonder
—
would you have the time?

The being before him stares into infinity.
Constellations in all different colors float in its black globe, sparkling points of cool, clear light.

Sir, if you please
...
the time?
(deKlend asks, with his most understatedly engaging manner)

As the mechanical hand opens and inserts itself into the kameez, reaching for the inner jacket pocket, the lapping sound grows more distinct.
There must be a transistor radio, tuned between stations, in the jacket.
The hand produces the lidless, chalk-white eye of a pocket watch and holds it out for deKlend’s inspection.

He notes the time, and as well the word “Wednesday” that appears, slightly off center, in a little crescent window cut into the face.

Spiffing watch, (he says coolly)

and the arm that had been steady as a carving’s smoothly restores it to its place.
Again the low whoosh of static emerges from the clothes.

Down in the static the word “Votu” is pronounced clearly.
A wave of fear suddenly stiffens his body leaving him instantly sick and cold;
it’s as if the soul of the figure before him had spoken to him from another world through the radio.

You imbecile (he thinks, struggling to control his face)
—
you imbecile!

Weakness rinses down his legs.
He kneels and opens his hands.

Splendid angel (he begins) I implore
...

He breaks off as the figure steps forward, leaving its head hanging where it was, and, standing immediately over him, folds its arms in a gesture of imperious disdain.

A burst of

sadstspoafditpttdwhetioadiartcoicafwsimitcotyah598ad1201ifagoomawaeocavatwapodifnattetwdmziranoiwhturimvotuahstvatlwohwnwfangowbrhiamnemosemeopmmaotbhsutsgaitcohswathimluttmutptmutdaatdpwfthotnifeivotutwowsoafopltpiootcbsntshadalygwctgoatwshwmpwtooogasalwcittposhnwnhahseotsaobaaswlblapwaeosamlsptvaotehlatcyotgcfttptmohgtgkf

erupts from the figure’s clothes.

My vocation!
(deKlend says rapturously)

Tears spill from his eyes.
Black Radio!
He is paying no attention now to what it says, pressing his hands into his shawl.

The night sky appears across the black globe.
A constellation of six or seven pinlights that sparkle with purple fires strays from the blackness of the globe to the dark air surrounding it, and escapes.
The being disappears upwards, a light falls on him from one side, a door frame filled with daylight, and deKlend walks through it on a spacious road of red clay dusted with fragrant cassia and framed to either side by enormous fields of white roses in bud, a small herd of wisents grazing, sharply pointed cobalt peaks tower into a clear and vibrant sky, in the distance, apparently emerging from the foothills, a colorful city overspread with huge white sails like plumes of steam.
Small girls flit from branch to branch in the tree, and others frolic on all fours in the distant grass, perk up their long ears at him.
Hastily rushing, impatient to discover the end of the narrow path, deKlend passes a roadside shrine, yawning and dark as a cave, a few monks, sun gleaming on their scalps, bustling around the side of the shrine as deKlend passes.
And some raise their voices, perhaps at him
—
and if so in a not unfriendly tone
—
while another kind of sound altogether comes from the interior of the shrine, a hollow whooshing with a grating noise chewing around inside.
But deKlend ignores these distractions and continues to follow the tiny track which seems to have been made for dolls or elves to follow, walking rapidly in tangling vines and thorny bracken jaggedly closing over his head, so that he must creep on all fours, searching like an anteater the black slush-caulked pavement that shines in the limpid dark with the reflected blazes of the sharp and orange streetlights.
There is a clammy, lukewarm light on the horizon as the dawn is coming up.

*

The landscape here is littered with derelict buildings and work sites well apart.
After some days search, deKlend stumbles across the old smithy and immediately begins setting it to rights.

Sortieing into the scrub adjacent to the woods he startles a few animals, somewhere halfway between cows and deer, and soon finds himself in among the ferns or whatever they are.
The sulking daylight comes from a sun that hangs low behind him, and throws its illumination forward in the gloom faintly silvering the leaves.
He reaches out, bends a stem, and hears hammers tapping.
The plant is unfamiliar to deKlend, but it seems to be the right one;
taking out his knife, he squats down and cuts the branch free of the trunk at its base, just above the soil.
Then he trims it, leaving only the long, whiplike green branch, with livid tufts where he’d cut off its twigs, and its furious spikes, each over an inch long, flexible, a little translucent, and hard, like fingernails.
Pinching it between its thorns, deKlend carries it away.

The shed is cadaverous grey planks.
There was a door once, but that part of the shed, that section of the wall, which is half of one of the four, is neatly cut away and completely gone.
A window, however, remains, with its glass intact, densely misted over with mineral rime so that the outside, as seen through it, is dimmed and etherealized.

The furnace is a pumpkin with a door in it;
once the ashes choking the hatch are cleared away, he thrusts his head through it and, with a little light, can see the scoring, like streaks of guano, on the inside, and the all the varieties of excrement left by intense fires
—
ash, cinders, defunct embers.

The anvil is nothing more than a shapeless piece of metal, smelling strongly of iodine, that might at one time have been part of an anchor.

deKlend lights a fire of trash, bits of dried wood, and, sparingly, lumps of coal he’d found in a few big bags behind the shed.
As the heat increases, deKlend sets his green branch on the anvil;
using a vise and some pliers he found in a heap in a corner, he carefully straightens a number of thin iron rods, until they are as straight as he can make them.
He wraps the branch, thorns and all, in the rods, winding a length of wire around the bundle;
then, he pounds out some wire flat to form tape, which he at first intends to wrap around the bundle as well, but then, thinking better of it, he undoes the bundle and, after restraightening some of the rods, he weaves the tape in and out of them and around the branch, braiding them laboriously together.
The results are no good.
The fourth time he believes the bundle looks right, and, pausing to retrieve some more fresh wire, he rebinds it.

The furnace glows, pops, squeals, and, wrapping himself up in an
apron, gloves, goggles, a pair of thick waders, deKlend begins working the bellows.
The flames devour their fuel greedily and flare up roaring.
In no time the fire is white, the clear snowy tongues cascade out the little door in a ravening fringe
—
deKlend takes the bundle, which he has layered with rods until it is as round and bunched as a parasol, and thrusts it into the heat.
He works the bellows.
With tongs he withdraws the incandescent length of metal and sets it on the anvil, where it warbles and hisses in shock and anger.

Looking at that shimmering white metal, a frenzy comes over him and he throws himself on the anvil, snatching hammers in each hand he flails away wildly;
the bundle complains in a high cracked chiming voice.
deKlend windmills at the anvil sparks spattering him from top to bottom pitting his apron
—
from time to time he drops the hammers with a loud clang and tongs the iron back into the flames that dash over him like surf.
Heedlessly he bends into them too close, staring half-blinded into the secret world in the middle of the fire, weirdly still and quivering, a kind of red igloo in a white storm, and the shank tossing and turning feverishly on the coals, its glinting length showing depths of red and black throbbing up to white again as he pulls the iron back out and sets it on the anvil, a heavy palm of heat billow from it, whale away with both hammers and with the first or second stroke a little gob of hot iron is thrown off with the plume of sparks deKlend picks it up and reflexively pops it into his mouth
—
his eyes bulge, steam and smoke fume from his lips, his motion to take up his hammer with that hand stops as it begins and he flings himself on the ground with a strangled scream, steam from his throat, clawing at his chest.
deKlend snaps on the ground like a fish out of water, jerks onto his hands and knees then lunges up to the anvil, vomits the iron
bit back up again.
It lands on the blade in a gout of steam and vanishes back into the iron.

deKlend woozily resumes his work and this time a slow but implacably building mania battens on him.
The furnace’s feather boas whip all around
—
he can be seen bounding in the flames as he strikes the iron first with one hammer, then the other, then leaps up on the anvil to stamp it with both his heels.
The building sways and the gaps between the boards flutter, the planks are starting to smoulder, the wood smokes and chars with the heat as days and nights sail by in a blur, and now the whole building is thickly plastered with red fires that burst like viscous sweat from the groaning wood, the timbers clash, the boards tumble down on top of him and are burned.
Now, scorched from head to foot, blasted by fire, surrounded by the charred shed, in columns of smoke and charcoalized stalagmites, the furnace like a ruptured clam beside him, his hammers vaporized, deKlend holds the red iron in his hands and whacks it crazily against the anvil.
The hammerheads seem to have been driven into the long, pointless shank, still with a surly inflammated redness under its quickly blackening skin.
He lifts it up, almost as if he proposed to swallow it, too, but he is only raising it to look judiciously down its winding length.

He raises it, as it happens, to that point precisely where the sun is on the high horizon, on top of the mountains, so that it seems to touch the sun like the tip of a key brushing the keyhole.
A sort of crispening sensation goes down the blade, and, with very gentle pressure, deKlend uses the sword to split the infinitely thin divide separating night and day, then turns the shank with a sharp twist.